Sins of the Father
by ariel2me
Summary: Three fathers, three daughters, and disappointment. (Doran Martell-Arianne Martell, Stannis Baratheon-Shireen Baratheon, Balon Greyjoy-Asha Greyjoy)


**Doran**

_When did you decide to disinherit me? What did I ever do to make you hate me so, Father?_

"I never hated you," he had replied, full of grief and sorrow for the things unsaid and the questions unasked. If only she had come to him, when she found his letter to Quentyn. _What does this mean, Father?_ _Why would Quentyn rule Dorne after you, and not me?_

_I love you Arianne, just like I have always loved you. I have another plan for you._

And yet, could he have told her the truth, even then? Arianne at four and ten was even more reckless than she was now. And her recklessness at three and twenty had almost resulted in the death of Myrcella Baratheon, not to mention possibly plunging Dorne into war.

_But I am partly to blame for that as well._ The girl who used to run to her father when she skinned her knee, secure in the conviction that she was loved, that she was treasured, had spent the last nine years believing the opposite.

_"You disappoint me, Arianne_," he had told her, at the height of his anger. "_You have been disappointing me for years, Father_," she had countered in reply. Was it too late for them, even now? Time was not on their side, he knew that better than anyone.

**Balon**

They stole his sons. Not just Rodrik and Maron, Theon too. They stole his wife as well, Alannys no better than a living corpse now. They would pay, both of them, Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon, Balon had vowed, the day he bended the knee and watched them rob him of his last living son. A ward, Ned Stark had said. A hostage, Balon knew the truth to be.

"No man has ever died from bending the knee," he told Asha later. His daughter. His only child now. "We bend the knee to rise again, blade in hand." To strike the blade to Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon's throats, Balon relished the thought. That was the thought that kept him going, day by day, as voices whispered that the krakens were cowed and Balon Greyjoy merely brooding in his Seastone Chair.

But he was not cowed and he was not merely brooding. Balon Greyjoy was biding his time. Biding his time and training his daughter. Preparing her for the inevitable. She was everything he could hope for, and more. As hard and strong as her dead brothers had been. And smarter; she was wiser and smarter than Rodrik and Maron had ever been - Balon had even allowed that disloyal thought to cross his mind once in a while.

The son who came back from Winterfell was no son of his at all. _This_ was his heir? This soft greenlander with none of the tenacity of the Iron Islands in him at all. Balon was appalled. _You were ten when you left, how did you forget so easily?_ This man, no, this _boy_, would not do. This boy must not sit the Seastone Chair, Balon vowed. That was meant for Asha, the child _he_ had raised and molded in his image.

"Perhaps we have been too hard on Theon," Asha said one day, to Balon's great disgust.

"Don't disappoint me, Asha!" His tone was telling her that she had already done so, with those words. "You are my only child."

_My last hope._

Asha's stony silence made him suspect that the disappointment was mutual.

**Stannis**

"I hope you are not too disappointed, my lord husband," Selyse had written him after Shireen's birth. "It will be a boy next time, I am convinced of that."

There had not been a boy, or another girl either. Selyse was determined to keep trying, Stannis mostly indifferent to the act itself. _I did my duty_, he insisted.

Selyse's determination for a son did not deter her from showing affection to the daughter they had. He watched their easy ways with each other, mother and daughter, and found it perplexing. The shy, melancholic child and her proud, haughty mother. And yet in each other's company, both seemed almost … content, if such a thing was possible in a place as doomed and ill-fated as Dragonstone.

He did not find his daughter a disappointment, more a baffling puzzle. Holding her in his arms for the first time, months after her birth, and only after she almost died, he wondered how something so tiny and so fragile could make so much noise. Her first word, her first step; he had missed them all, receiving news of them only from Selyse's letters, letters he did not always reply to.

He was shocked to realize that she had learned to read and write, when he received the first letter from Shireen. The words were big and painstakingly formed. He had stared at them for a long time, trying to imagine Shireen at her desk, hard at work, concentrating, writing each word carefully. But he could not imagine it, for her face was lost to him. He had seen his daughter last six, no, seven moons ago.

She came to see him after Blackwater, shy and afraid and nervous. Of her own father. "I'm sorry you lost a battle, Father," she had said, looking at her feet instead of her father's face.

He said nothing at first. "Are you disappointed, Shireen?" He asked, finally.

She frowned, uncertain what he was asking. "Disappointed that you lost a battle?"

_That I am your father._

"That I didn't win," he said instead.

She smiled. "Of course not. Mother said you are going to win the war," she said, with an earnest conviction that would have broken his heart, if he had one.


End file.
